Alsop

On January 27, 2009, Jonathan Alsop, Services at SOL LEVINSON & BROS., INC., 8900 Reisterstown Road at Mount Wilson Lane on Monday, February 2 at 3 P.M. Interment Baltimore Hebrew Cemetery - Berrymans Lane. Please omit flowers. Contributions in his memory may be sent to the charity of your choice. In mourning at 2502 Lightfoot Drive, Baltimore, MD 21209 sollevinson.com

If it has a good beat, you can count on Marin Alsop to conduct it with infectious energy. That point is being driven home by her latest program with the Baltimore Symphony, which has one more local performance before the orchestra takes it to Carnegie Hall on Monday. To start this sampling of 20th and 21st century repertoire, there is the pulsating “Shaker Loops,” an early-1980s classic of minimalism for string orchestra by John Adams. To close, Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 4 (the revised version of 1947)

On August 24, 2003, JAMES D. ALSOP SR., loving husband of Etta Alsop; beloved father of James Jr., daughter-in-law Marlene, grandson Justin, and other family and friends. Friends may call at the JOSEPH L. RUSS FUNERAL HOME, 2222 W. North Avenue on Thursday from 3 to 8 P.M., with family hour 7 to 8. Wake Saturday, August 30, 10 A.M. with Funeral to follow at 11 at Jerusalem Baptist Church, 21180 Bagby Road, Sparta, VA.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will be jetting to the West Coast this week for a six-day, three-city tour - its first extended outing since Marin Alsop was named music director five years ago. The tour, which begins Wednesday, opens with a concert in Orange County, Calif., and concludes with one in Eugene, Ore. Between those performances will be a three-day residency at the University of California at Berkeley. "Artistically, it's great for the orchestra, because we get to play in a different hall every day," said Alsop.

Marin Alsop's inaugural season as music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is ending pretty much the way it started, with a program that places a sizable contemporary American work alongside a blockbuster from the standard European canon. In this case, the former is Joan Tower's big and often bracing Concerto for Orchestra; the latter is Beethoven's Symphony No. 9. The results Thursday night at the Music Center at Strathmore were also pretty much the same as at the season launch back in September - a hot performance of the modern piece, something less than a totally persuasive account of the venerable classic.

"Joe Alsop's Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue," by Edwin M. Yoder Jr. 220 pages. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. $24.95The day will soon be here, alas, when a child or two will turn to a parent and ask, "Mommy, what was a syndicated columnist?" Edwin Yoder's wise little book on Joseph Alsop, who plied that demanding trade - three columns a week when it mattered - can give a satisfying answer."Stopping Taft had become a top priority item on the columnists" agenda by early 1952,'Yoder writes of the brothers Alsop, Joseph and Stewart, during the campaign year when Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio and General Dwight D. Eisenhower contended for the Republican nomination.

Shortly after signing a new five-year contract that will keep her in the post of Baltimore Symphony Orchestra music director until 2015, Marin Alsop led the ensemble in a hefty program Thursday night that included the East Coast premiere of Jennifer Higdon's Violin Concerto. Written for Baltimore's own classical music star, Hilary Hahn, it's a killer of a concerto for the soloist, and it asks a lot of listeners, too. Cast in three movements, the half-hour concerto makes a grand statement, packed with thematic material and expansive development, all of it delivered with extraordinarily prismatic colors.

The musical relationship between the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and music director Marin Alsop hit a new plateau Thursday night. Just about everything clicked tightly and expressively in a meaty program that drew a big, happy crowd - and a TV crew from CBS Evening News gathering footage for future use. After a few weeks of spotty attendance for guest conductor-led programs, it was reassuring to see the turnout at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, although I...

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra will help pay tribute to Leonard Bernstein at New York's Carnegie Hall next season, performing his eclectic Mass with the Morgan State University Choir and Brooklyn (N.Y.) Youth Chorus. BSO music director and Bernstein protege Marin Alsop will conduct the Carnegie performance Oct. 24, as well as another concert the next day at the United Palace Theater, a restored vaudeville/movie venue in the uptown New York neighborhood of Washington Heights. The second performance will involve hundreds of New York City public-school students.

Saying they had found "a dynamic leader to restore the vigor to our organization and be an ambassador to our community and the world," BSO officials formally introduced Marin Alsop as their new music director yesterday. The announcement capped a tumultuous five days during which many orchestra members objected strongly to the timing of her appointment. Yesterday's presentation and a morning sit-down between Alsop and the BSO's musicians were part of an effort to try to offset any lingering disharmony.

It is possible to quibble with the idea of cramming three blockbuster works into a single program, but the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra carries it off. Ravel's "Bolero," that brilliant study in rhythmic and melodic reiteration, not to mention crescendo, is more likely to serve as a concert finale than a curtain-raiser for Tchaikovsky's barnstorming Piano Concerto No. 1. But here they are, back to back. And after two of classical music's greatest hits, why not one more? Well, at least one of classical music's greatest minutes — the introductory passage of Strauss' "Also Sprach Zarathustra," now more commonly identified as the theme from the sci-fi classic "2001.

At the age of 16, a French villager named Jeanne d'Arc responded to what she said were the voices of saints, exhorting her to take up arms against English invaders. Dressed in male clothing, she led troops to victory in battle after battle before being captured when she was 19. Jeanne heard voices again soon enough, but these were decidedly human ones, some mocking her and others praying for her as she slowly burned to death at the stake during a brutal execution carried out 580 years ago. This week, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra presents its first performance of a 1938 oratorio commemorating the woman whose faith, vision and bravery would eventually earn her sainthood.

It's still late-summer, but classical musicians can hardly wait to get back into the concert hall for the 2011-2012 season. One of the first to return is the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra . Conductor Marin Alsop leads a Gala Celebration concert Sept. 10 at Baltimore's Meyerhoff Symphony Hall that features a Baltimore native, violinist Hilary Hahn , playing Mendelssohn's Violin Concerto. This program also includes a BSO-commissioned piece, David T. Little's Baltimore-themed "Charm," reinforcing Alsop's commitment to new music.

When 9-year-old Andre Palmer and 119 of his classmates at Lockerman Bundy Elementary School file out of the wings of the Meyerhoff Symphony Hall tonight and again on Sunday, it won't look like just an ordinary concert. Chances are that some of the musicians' shoelaces will be untied, as they were during a Tuesday afternoon rehearsal. Andre and the other pint-sized performers playing the cellos and double basses will have to raise their arms above their heads to avoid dragging their extra-large instruments across the stage floor.

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's infrequent presentations of opera-in-concert over the past decade have included a repertoire well off the beaten path — Tchaikovsky's "Iolanta" in 2000 and Bartok's "Bluebeard's Castle" in 2005. This weekend, the focus is very familiar, very popular fare: Mozart's "The Magic Flute. " "It is the first opera I ever heard when I was a kid," said BSO music director Marin Alsop. "My dad told me the story and all about the secret codes, how the number 3 is important.

Restaurateur Cindy Wolf is an expert at keeping a souffle from collapsing, but not a lighter-than-air comedy routine. And Marin Alsop definitely does not encourage improvisation when she is conducting the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. They are just two of the half-dozen local celebrities who will gamely (and, perhaps, foolishly) join members of the nation's most famous comedy troupe on stage in the Head Theater during select performances of " Second City Does Baltimore. " This is the Chicago-based troupe that has launched the careers of such famous funny men and women as Steve Carell, Tina Fey, John Belushi and Stephen Colbert.

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. - Picture it. A TV commercial. Voice-over: "Congratulations Marin Alsop! Now that you've just been named new music director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, what do you do next?" Alsop grins broadly and declares: "I'm going to Daytona Beach!" Not a very likely advertisement, perhaps, but the scenario isn't at all far-fetched. A day after signing a contract with the BSO to take charge of the podium in 2007, and with the music world still buzzing about a startling request from the orchestra's musicians to continue searching for a music director, Alsop hit the beach.

NEW YORK --When Marin Alsop stepped onto the podium of the Carnegie Hall stage to lead the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on Saturday night, a considerable crescendo of applause rose from a sizable audience that included feminist Gloria Steinem, stellar soprano Jessye Norman and Trey Anastasio, formerly of the rock group Phish. ... That feeling of good will in the house never abated. There was a sense of occasion about the event, which drew a larger turnout from the musical press than has typically greeted the BSO here in recent years.

Marin Alsop, not one to do things by halves, will conduct the last concert of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra's season Sunday afternoon and then plunge directly into the new, weeklong BSO Academy that will help amateur musicians get reconnected to their art by working with the pros. Lately, the orchestra's music director has been doubly active offstage, too, planting firmer roots in Baltimore — city and county. This season, Alsop settled into a condo she bought in a stylishly converted Mount Vernon church.

Though two Baltimore-based musical groups lost in the 52nd annual Grammy Awards Sunday, Marin Alsop, conductor for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, did come away a winner. The BSO's recording of Leonard Bernstein's epic, controversial music-theater piece "Mass" was a nominee for Best Classical Album, a category won by the San Francisco Symphony. Alsop conducted Jennifer Higdon's Percussion Concerto on a London Philharmonic recording that was named Best Classical Contemporary Composition.